During
spring, colorful high desert sage grouse gather at dawn on their leks.

Males puff up
their feathers and chests, trying to entice a coy female grouse to pick
them as a mate. It's one of the best shows going in sagebrush country.

Through a bit of luck, I located one of these leks on my own. One morning, I drove past an area where a dozen or more grouse flushed at the sight of my truck. I decided to camp there that night to see if they would be back in the morning.

Idaho's
Snake River desert isn't much different than eastern Oregon's sagebrush
plains. The grouse
were 10 miles south of Arco, a town best known for being the world's
first to get its electricity from the atom.

The restricted Idaho
National Laboratory, a 60-year-old nuclear reservation, remains the
dominant feature near Arco, but the grouse were on public Bureau of Land
Management land, putting them in range for me to watch.

At 5:30 a.m., the first sounds were audible: "loop, loop, loop" from air
expelled through pouches on their breasts. The noise ends with a
plopping sound as the deflated pouches slam against breast bones.

I watched for an hour before a rancher drove past, breaking up another party.

The sage grouse strutting ground, called a
lek, is on the east side of the Arco-Minidoka Road, 5.25 miles south of
where BLM land begins southwest of Arco. The sage grouse may or may not
use the same lek each year.